The Journal. - Vibe Coding Could Change Everything

Episode Date: February 4, 2026

Vibe coding, the process of turning a text prompt into actual software, has taken the AI world by storm. And it has investors in everything from software to legal services nervous. WSJ’s Joanna Stern and Ben Cohen tell us about their experience using Claude Code to develop an article. Ryan Knutson hosts. Further Listening: The Era of AI Layoffs Has Begun Her Client Was Deepfaked. She Says xAI Is to Blame. Sign up for WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do you guys want to start out by introducing yourselves? Oh, why don't you go first, Joanna? I am Joanna Stern. I am the senior personal technology columnist at the Wall Street Journal. I am Ben Cohen. I am the Science of Success columnist for the Wall Street Journal. Ben and Joanna aren't just colleagues. They're also friends who frequently text back and forth. Well, I often send Joanna annoying text messages about technology, and I started bothering her with texts about Claudeau. code asking if she had played around with it and also asking like when are you going to write about it. Claude code is a coding tool made by the AI company Anthropic.

The tool allows users to create websites, apps, or anything that requires coding just by typing your vision into a chat box. It's a process known as vibe coding. It's coding with your vibes, right? You don't know how to code. You type it into your chatbot, describe the thing you want, and create the thing. Late last year, Claude received a major update. And it worked so well, it started blowing people's minds

in the tech world. And a few weeks ago, Ben started playing with it and texting Joanna about the stuff he was making. His first one was he was bragging about his new personal website that he made with Claude

And he was like, hey, senior tech columnist, look at this website that I made. Aren't you proud of me? And I think my text back was like, that's really awesome. Welcome to 1995, Ben. Like, that's super cool. It looked old and crappy.

No, actually, it looked, it looks really good. Everyone should go visit bZcoen.com. Is that right? Absolutely. Ben and Joanna have both been spending a lot of time with Claude Code. And they say it's a development that could have big implications for jobs across many different industries. It makes vibe coding even simpler for people who don't know anything about code, but also do know everything about code. I mean, that's the amazing thing about this product is that people who have spent their lives,

as software developers and have risen to the top of their field as coders are now increasingly using Claude Code for their code in addition to people who don't know a lick of code like Joanna and me. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudsen. It's Wednesday, February 4th. Coming up on the show, why everyone is freaking out about Claude Code. This episode is brought to you by Fidelity. You check how well something performs before you buy it.

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WealthSimple.com. So I've been reading a lot about Claude Code, and I've been seeing a lot of people who follow AI saying that this could be the biggest thing to happen in AI since ChatGPT. Why are people making that comparison? Well, I think since we've had the chat GPT moment, we've seen all of this progression in models. And so I think all these big leaps we've had with AI products, whether it be image generators or video generators, these have all been like small unlocks to things that computers can do for us, right? We're like, wow, holy crap, it made that image. And it looks so much better than the image it made last year, right?

And I think that's what this ClaudeCode moment was for coding and vibe coding was, wow, this is getting so good that people that are in the tech world are using this fully to write their code. All right. Tell me the story of how Claude Code was created. Okay, so the origin story. of Claude goes back to September 2024,

like the ancient days of AI like 18 months ago, with Boris Churney, who is the father of Claudecode, he began

tinkering with this coding tool as a side project one day not longer after he started at Anthropic. Churney was

just an engineer at Anthropic among the company's rank and file. He created Claude as a tool to

help him with his own job. It only took him a couple days to build. And when he shared

it internally in a company-wide Slack message, he had no idea how big of a deal it would become. It was celebrated with two raised-hands emojis in the company-wide Slack. But as his colleagues started using it, it became pretty clear it had a lot of potential. What he found interesting was that whenever he looked at the screens of data scientists within Anthropics, so not like software developers or coders, they were using cloud code, even when it wasn't actually all that easy to use. a primitive, clunky version of Claude they were getting value out of it. And then he starts looking around the office

and he sees non-technical people on the sales team using Claude Code to analyze their calls and summarize meetings. And he thinks, oh, this is actually interesting. People who are not just pure coders are using this to their advantage to. Anthropic released Claude to the public early last year,

but it wasn't until a major update last November that has started going viral. I think that timing is really important. It comes out right before everyone goes home for the holidays and is off. And I think that part of the momentum and how this thing spread so quickly in Silicon Valley is that people who work inside these companies were just at home. And it was the holidays and they were screwing around on their computers like they always do. And suddenly they had time and inclination to play an experiment with CloudCode.

I think a whole lot of them were like completely blown away by what they found. If you're not using CloudCode in 2026, you're going to fall behind. from Cursor to Clawed Code today based on all the hype. This is wild. This is actually wild. Yeah, it definitely is a game changer, and I'm loving it so far. In early January, Ben started playing around with it, too. And that's when he sent those text messages to Joanna.

And as they were chatting, they got an idea for a way to really put Claude Code to the test. And so we were kind of sending screenshots back and forth, and we were kind of like, we should probably just do a story on this together. And then as I looked at our chat, I was like, we should just make this the story. We should vibe code this conversation about vibe coding and see if we can make the website an interactive column and put it on the Wall Street Journal.com. Joanna and Ben wanted to see if the two of them, two writers with almost no coding experience, could create an interactive article on the Wall Street Journal's website just by using ClaudeCode. they wanted the webpage to include screenshots of their chat messages with buttons that would allow readers to toggle into different formats.

So the conversation might initially look like messages on an iPhone, but click a button and the chat box would now look like AOL Instant Messenger from the 1990s. And to make this, all Joanna had to do was describe her idea to Claude Code. I just put in this prompt to Claude Code. I'll read you part. I said, I'm writing an article for the Wall Street Journal with my colleague Ben Cohen. The idea is that Ben and I go back and forth in the story to debate the merits of vibe coding. The whole story is done with little chats back and forth, looking like IMessage chats with our photos. Please design a web page for this article.

And then what happened next? It did that, basically? It did that. It designed a Wall Street Journal page, what it thought it should look like. It took some liberties with our logo and everything. But everything that sort of came beyond the top header was, honestly, 50 people. percent of the way there of what we actually published. Ben and Joanna wrote all the words in the article and the chat messages between them,

but Claude wrote all the code, and it did it really, really fast. And I think my reaction was like, oh my God, not only are we doing this, I can't believe it did this already. I mean, this was like two minutes after we were talking about this. And then eventually we brought in some actual humans who know how to write code at the Walshry Journal to fix our code. So when we sent this to some of our in-house folks, Brian Whitten, who's one of our computational journalists, Audrey Val Buena, one of our designers, they had some notes. They weren't as impressed as we were. Coming up, we talked to one of those humans who knows how to write code and contemplate what this all means for people's jobs. With Amex Platinum, you have access to over 1,400 airport lounges worldwide.

So your experience before takeoff. is a taste of what's to come. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Conditions apply. Now streaming on Paramount Plus. It began on the shores of New Jersey. The calls of gym, tan, laundry, reverberated north to Canada, where a new type of party animal resides.

They move as a herd migrating to their favorite watering holes, asserting dominance by flexing, grinding, and twerking. Coupling is quick, steamy, and sometimes in hot tubs. When morning arrives, they do it all over again. Canada Shore, new original series, now streaming on Paramount Plus. Brian Whitten is a computational journalist at the Wall Street Journal. Sometimes I like to call it journalism at scale. I'll build a lot of tools for reporters, investigative tools, reporting tools, things to help them analyze stuff that we can put together.

And sometimes they'll build interactive things for readers to click on, which is nice, because then I could show my parents something and be like, I built that. and they'll understand what I do. Brian is one of the people Joanna and Ben showed their code to. What did you think when Joanna and Ben brought you this code and this little project they've been working on? What was your reaction? I guess first I was just like super impressed and glad to see more people messing around with this kind of stuff

because these coding agents kind of turn everybody into a developer, which is exciting for me because that means you can be, doing more things and all of the responsibility doesn't necessarily fall down to one person when it comes to building tools or building things. But as Brian dug into the code, he saw that not everything was perfect. At first, I saw a lot of outdated practices in the code looking like it'd been coded in the late 90s. There are significant problems with accessibility. You couldn't really use the keyboard to do things.

If you were using a screen reader, you'd have no idea what was going on. the styles needed updating. It would have clashed with stuff on the page. It did stuff that would have kind of made the rest of the page look like a mess if we'd left it in there. Oh, and there was a bug. There were a few bugs. So if you were to give it a percentage of just going from, like, was it 100% done, 90% done? How would you give it a grid?

Say 80%. It was pretty close. 80% sounds like a lot. Yeah. Here's our colleague Ben again. This is also like a really instructive example. Like code might get you 90% of the way there, but for that 10%, humans are not just valuable,

but kind of essential, right? Like this whole thing doesn't happen without that last 10%. Still, the process was a lot more efficient. I have built many of these types of projects here over my years at the Wall Street Journal, working with our development team, working with our great graphics and design team.

And projects like this can take weeks, if it's a really big project where you've got a lot of deep reporting and you need it to look really perfect. This, as we were saying, took seconds and two days to get from start of idea to finish. I asked Brian, the computational journalist, if Claude Cod Code made him worried about his job. Not really.

As someone who uses Codd Cod all day, every day, I feel safe because I'm maybe being short-sighted, but it seems like the more I use these things and the more I build with them, there's a limit to how satisfying the result is without a person seriously directing it and adjusting what it's producing. There's a lot of technical know-how

when it comes to knowing what to tell it to do. Brian thinks it will have an impact on jobs, but it's unclear exactly what that impact will be. It's lowering the bar for coding projects. It allows us to be more ambitious. And so if you think of a company that has maybe one or two engineers and they want to do an ambitious project, before this, you'd need to scale up, staff up,

five, ten, twenty people working on it. But with coding agents, you can get to that level with only one or two people. So I think the optimistic case is you'll have maybe companies with lower headcount, with fewer engineers working for them, but more companies with engineers building things because they can do it with these coding agents. This is how Boris Churney, at Anthropic, is using the tool he created

as something to dramatically increase his productivity. A year ago, 10% of his code was coming from Cloud Code. Six months ago, 50% of his code was coming from Cloud Code. Now, over the past two months, he has not written a single line of code by hand himself. 100% of his code is coming from Cloud Code. Not only that, Churny now starts his day by spinning up multiple cloud coding agents at once, effectively creating a small team of robot developers.

He calls this multi-clotting. It's the idea that you can have these agents doing various tasks for you at the same time, like you would have a team. He has a sort of good system that works across all of the devices, and he told us he launches it, is like, fix this issue or make this new feature. And so these agents, these clod codes, are just working on that while he's getting ready. for work and while he's commuting to work. He's constantly managing his multi-clod team. His little team of agents. Yeah.

There's something crazy and also profound about this, which is that he is no longer a coder. He is a manager of like this fleet of robot coders that are working on his behalf. But like in the past, he wouldn't be managing a team of robots. He'd be managing a team of junior coders. So doesn't this mean that this could take out like a whole layer

of entry-level jobs for people? This is the biggest question. This is the biggest question right now. All others in the AI industry are wondering the same exact thing. So what's your sense of how disruptive this particular version of the technology is going to be in the workplace?

Do you think people are going to lose their jobs as this starts to become more widely used? People are losing their jobs, first of all. We need to accept that there are certain industries where people are already losing their jobs. It's clear that there are, certain professions and occupations where people are going to be able to take advantage of this. And the implication of that are, like, very uncertain right now.

Like, what the productivity implications are, what the workforce displacement implications are. Like, I don't think we really know what they're going to be yet. What we do know is that, like, there are fields where this is coming if it's not already here. Here's Anthropic CEO Dario Amadeh, talking at a recent Wall Street Journal event. There are whole jobs, whole careers that we built for decades that may not be present. And, you know, I think we can deal with it. I think we can adjust to it. But I don't think there's an awareness at all of what is coming here and the magnitude of it.

And the thing that is both thrilling and, like, deeply terrifying, as Joanna has written many times over the past few years, this is the worst and dumbest that these AI models are ever going to be, right? What we are playing with now is only going to get better in the days and weeks and especially months and years to come. In the last few days, Anthropic added new features to ClaudeCode, including a tool that can review legal contracts and perform other industry-specific functions. It's also released tools for finance and customer service. Then, on Monday, OpenAI updated similar tools. In response, investors started dumping shares of companies. they worried could be most vulnerable to disruption.

And how much did investors lose? Some $300 billion in value. Software names getting hit again today after the sell-off yesterday amid these fears of AI disrupting the industry. Piper Sandler downgraded a few stocks. They are Adobe, Freshworks, Vertex. The concern is that this could be an existential crisis for some companies. Why pay for software solutions

when you can now build your own far more easily using something like Claude Code? In one or five or ten years, looking back on the development of AI, how big of a moment would you say the release of cloud code will be thought to be? I think it goes to one of the quotes that we had from Boris Journey, which is this is a major democratizing moment in coding and in AI development. And this will have been the moment that some company, whether it's Google or Open AI, saw as crap. We got to make that thing right now because everyone's going to want to make it. make a new app or a new tool that's going to better themselves. And so this, that is that moment right now. Also, OpenAI had a chat cheapy team moment. Google really had like the Gemini

three nanobanana moment a few months ago. This is that moment for Anthropic. Like this is like the breakout moment for one of the top frontier labs that, you know, at this time next year might very well be one of the most valuable companies in the world. That's all for today. Wednesday, February 4th. The journal is a co-production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Ben Dummit, Xavier Martinez, Bradley Olson, and Alexander Ossipovich. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.